“Envisioning High Performance”By Jenni Sorkin, Art JournalThis article in Art Journal (Summer 2003), about the first five years of the magazine that preceded CAN, won the College Art Association’s 2004 Art Journal Award. Read it for free online at JSTOR (registration).

Review: “The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena”By Frances Phillips, Grantmakers in the Arts
This review, published in The Grantmakers in the Arts Reader (Vol 11, No. 1, Summer 2000), examines an “The Citizen Artist” (1998, 344 pp.; Critical Press, New York), an anthology of writings from High Performance magazine Says Phillips: “Questions the anthology raises about artist and audience, art and placement, meaning and inclusiveness are still fresh and profound.”

Review: “The Citizen Artist“
By Patricia C Phillips, Public Art Review
Review by a noted critic published in Forecast Public Art’s Public Art Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1999, reproduced in the University of Minnesota’s UMedia Archive (page 39; be patient). To quote Phillips: “The words and works of Adrian Piper, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Lucy Lippard, Richard Posner, and other, all make this publication an intelligent and inspiring resource. Through these prominent artist’s voices we discover the vulnerability and excitement of inquiry, the stunning potential of emerging ideas, and the alchemy of theoretical integrity with personal tenacity.”

Imagining America award to Linda Frye Burnham and Steven DurlandPresented at Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life National Conference, “What Sustains Us?” September 22-24, 2011, Minneapolis, “for three decades of democratic arts journalism, from High Performance Magazine through the CommunityArts Network.”

An interview with Steven Durland By Dan GodstonSteve Durland speaks on the Community Arts Network, working with his wife Linda, and “following the artists.” It appeared on examiner.com in 2010.

“Community Arts Network Website Closing“By Dennis Baker
A blog statement by a CAN supporter in response to the announcement September 6, 2009, that the Community Arts Network (CAN) website would be closing.

Think Big, Act SmallBy Linda Frye Burnham, Art Work
A short treatise on professional survival, written right before CAN hit the dust for lack of funding. Published November 23, 2009, in Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor and Economics (newspaper and website published by Temporary Services).

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Quotes

I am on our town’s Public Arts Commission as well as on the board of our local arts council
and the research and essays are beneficial as we are constantly making decisions as to the
direction we’ll take on the issues that come up in our town and county.

A municipal Public Arts Commissioner, 2007

ARTivention was created in direct response to my interest in social practice and art activism. In 2004, I read The Citizen Artist edited by Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland. The book affirmed my inherent belief of art’s capacity to simultaneously critique and give voice to cultural and social practices.

As they were written, the essays now found in The Citizen Artist were mapping a terrain in the art world at the moment that a new horizon was coming into view. Looking back one now can see intersections between works that seemed disparate at the time — art that was spiritually motivated and indebted to ritual, art responding to the degradation of the environment, and art tapping the collective voices of the disenfranchised. Questions the anthology raises about artist and audience, art and plac…

Frances Phillips, Grantmakers in the Arts, 2000

CAN is a constant resource, making available the community arts/cultural animation discourse which is not present in such an organized form anywhere else.

A CAN website user, 2007

I am a graduate student reading essays chosen by my professor for a multi-level community arts class. It has been unanimous that the resources your CAN Web site provides are very valuable to our class and to personal interests and professional passions that have risen during our studies.

A graduate student, 2007

As a funder of community arts, I find everything CAN does of great value, especially in terms of following the state of the art around the world. Community arts is an evolving creative practice, and CAN is the best way I’ve found to understand what artists, community leaders, and participants are trying to accomplish.

A Toronto Art Council staffer, 2007

I use archived essays in my undergrad classes such as Intro to Theatre and Exploring Cultural Diversity Through Performance. I am also constantly referring graduate students to this site as well for an independent reading on Community-based Arts—a good portion of what the grad students will read comes from this site.

A university educator, 2007

You didn’t have to be an Angeleno to know about, be entertained by, and value High Performance. The magazine,may have been the first in the world devoted exclusively to what became known (for better or worse) as “performance art.” It was certainly one of the first, one of the best produced, and one of the least parochial, including articles about artists and documentation of performances the world over.

Peter Frank, L.A. Weekly, 2003

I consider the CAN Web site the hub of the international community arts world and an important part of my professional life and networking within the field. For example, I have an e-mail in my in-box from a new colleague from an Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development Center in Australia who discovered my work through the CAN site (as many others have). Yesterday I connected this new colleague up with two indigenous women here in the Midwest USA.

A community arts professional, 2007

I use CAN to learn about how other community based arts organizations are functioning. I learn a lot about audience development, services to artists, grants and other funding sources, and other subjects of interest to smaller scale arts organizations.